


The Family Business

by ShinobiCyrus



Category: Danny Phantom, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Hunters, Alternate Universe - Twins, Crossover, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, F/M, Family, Family Drama, Road Trips, Underage Drinking, hunting things, saving people
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-01-14 03:12:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1250566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShinobiCyrus/pseuds/ShinobiCyrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jazz Fenton moved halfway across the country to attend Yale for more than just the honor of earning an Ivy League degree. She was making a new life for herself, full of scholarships, coffeehouses, mid-terms, cramming, and her roommate dragging her to keggers.</p><p>It's hers, it's safe, it's blissfully Normal, and all it takes is one visit from her little brother to remind her just how flimsy a notion 'normal' really is. </p><p>"Mom and Dad went on a Hunting Trip...and they haven't been home in a few days.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Should I Stay or Should I Go?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got inspired by a flood of Supernatural/Danny Phantom crossover stories and Phanart on Tumblr. I'd honestly forgotten how much I missed the feel of Supernatural's earlier seasons. Less apocalyptic drama and more road trips, ghost stories, and American urban legends.

  _Snake River, Idaho: Then_  

The corpse is thinner than a child, but as tall as their father, covered in dull, mossy fur and thick scabs that perfectly resemble the bark from the trees surrounding them.

Jazz checks her rifle on reflex, keeping one eye on the dead Hidebehind, and the other sweeping over every individual tree nearby. She doubts there's another one hiding, but then again there shouldn't have been a second one, either.

Her attention drifts over to Jack, glaring orange hunting jacket painfully obvious around the ashen tamaracks. Maddie is more sensibly dressed for the forest in camouflage and earthen tones. She perches her old aviators on her forehead and is already sketching what's left of the first Hidebehind. No one had ever heard of them being anything other than solitary, and her mother is positively buzzing with hypotheses. Had they come across the two of them during some kind of mating period? Was this new paired stalking tactic an aberration, or indicative that the entire species were adapting to hunters' tactics?

The other one hadn't made a sound when it singled out Danny. They never make any more noise than the sigh of leaves and the wood-crackling of its jaw unhinging. The only warning they'd had was Danielle's shot, .357 right in the heart at long range. One bullet was all it needed; they were ferocious but not very durable. She preens as Jack ruffles her hair and tells her how well she looked after her brother.

Danny's sitting on a log, clutching his shaking rifle and watching the body like it might get up and try again. Monster blood like syrup and dirty whiskey splatter his face and his favorite Star Wars t-shirt.

Its arms are as long as Danny's entire body, spindly and gnarled like tree-branches. Even dead it still looks like it's reaching for something.

He's thirteen years old and can already incapacitate a grown man two hundred pounds heavier, field-strip a Beretta in ninety seconds, has faced off against two poltergeists and a bugbear, and at that moment never looked more like a little boy.

Jazz sits down next to him close enough that their shoulders touch but doesn't say a word, just joins his vigil over the dead thing that had been inches away from snacking on his intestines.

Honestly, she thinks such a patient, methodical predator doesn't deserve such a scant bestiary entry or comical illustrations for fledgling hunters to giggle over during long RV trips.

Danny must have had the same thought. “It's not funny anymore.”

* * *

_New Haven, Connecticut: Now_

When Jazz had first moved in, it had taken her two weeks to learn all of her apartment's unique little night-noises before she could finally get a full night's sleep. The scratches of tree-branches on her windows, the creaks and echoing rattles of old pipes in the walls, the groan of shifting wood, her roommate's snores from the other room; even in her sleep, Jazz knows when a sound doesn't belong.

She is awake and upright in seconds, eyes scanning the sinister shadows of her room as she strains her ears.

There it is again, the groan of the shoddy floorboards slightly muffled by the carpeting- the slow rhythm like cautious footfalls trying to make as little noise as possible.

Kitty keeps insisting left and right that her 'snoring' was all Jazz's imagination. Based on the nasally snorts coming from the next room over, Jazz imagines she's still fast asleep in her bed.

Someone else is in the apartment.

She clutches the key tied on a leather string around her neck; the locked trunk shoved away under her bed feels tangible and dense as if she were sitting on it instead of her matress.

The noise moves over to light thumps of shoes on linoleum. They're in the kitchen now. There is a person in her kitchen.

A person.

Jazz lets the key go and reaches for the baseball bat by her bed instead. It's probably just Johnny looking to end his and Kitty's bi-monthly 'split' ahead of schedule.

She climbs out of bed and stalks barefoot across the carpeting, her patent-pending Fenton Anti-Creep Stick comfortably in her grip. The wood fills her nose with scent of dried saltwater, and her hands run over carved symbols from nine different religions, seven of them technically extinct. At her door, she carefully removes the security bar jammed up against it and sets it aside, a bit pleased that an intruder in her home has validated this extra bit of paranoia.

...okay, so maybe it's actually a terrible thing to feel peppy over but if Kitty is going to tease her for a few completely reasonable security precautions then Jazz reserves the right to be a little smug over midnight intruders.

Anyways, it's not like she found any of the little charms and mala Jazz squirreled around the apartment. That would be harder to explain.

She opens the door just enough to minimize noise from the creaking hinges and slips into the hallway. Bat at the ready, she stalks soundlessly down the pitch black hall, trusting her ears and her familiarity with the layout in the dark. The tap of a pair of boots on hard floor is clearer now- good, still in the kitchen, then. Flattening her back against the wall, she slinks along it for the last few feet, springs out into the open with her bat raised-

-and completely ruins her night eyes on the light of the open fridge.

_Crap._

Instinct prompts her to pivot on her heels and swing the bat in a wide arc behind her. A featureless silhouette narrowly hops back out of range of the bat and immediately steps into her stance at an angle, shouldering her in the chest and grabbing for the middle of the bat and her wrist.

When her attacker hip-checks her, Jazz already knows it's too late and makes her body limp as she's thrown over his shoulder. She remembers to exhale when she lands hard on her back to keep the wind from getting knocked out of her. Still holding onto the bat with a death grip, she wastes no time trying to wrestle control of her only weapon back and kicks at the intruder's legs, tripping his footing and making him cry out.

“Ow! Hey! No kicking the shins!”

Jazz freezes instantly. Her attacker looks down on her, face to face, and that close she recognizes the the teasing grin and their dad's blue eyes even in the dark. “ _Danny?_ What the hell!”

“Just trying to keep you on your toes. Did you like that bit with a fridge light?” He pokes at her belly. “Looks like all that college is making you a bit soft-”

She wraps her legs around his torso twists her whole body. Danny flips hard onto the ground and yelps when she traps one of his legs in a wrestler hold and slowly starts bending it in a direction nature didn’t intend.

“Oh God I'm sorry I take it back! I take it back!” His palm slaps frantically on the carpet.

Big-sister cred restored, she lets go of his leg and stands, wordlessly accepting his hand and helping him up.

He's a bit taller now, finally outgrown that lanky awkwardness of being stretched thin from too many growth spurts and actually fits into that old, black army surplus jacket instead of being enveloped by it. Thank God, he cut his hair too. She knew the mullet thing was just a phase but going out in public with a stoop-shouldered eighties rocker throwback had been embarrassing by proxy.

Jazz wants to say something, anything, to him that was more than a five-minute phone call on a birthday or sending him an extra present to cheer him up during his Christmas grinchitude. She wants to pull him into a hug that would last so long he would groan and try to squirm out of it, she wants boil over with worry over why _now_ of all times he turns up halfway across the country to visit her out of the blue, she just wants to...to...

But all she does is hold the bat upside down and wring it anxiously in her hands.

“Sooo,” Danny shrugs and looks around the apartment. “You got anything to drink around here?”

“Um,” she points with the bat. “Fridge.”

“...right.”

It's not that she isn't glad to see him- he's her little brother. But having him in her apartment, rummaging through her refrigerator is too surreal. Her family life existed separately in a microcosm of musty tomes, knife-training, grave-desecration, and summers crammed in the family RV working down the list of the most haunted places in America.

Yale was scholarships, coffeehouses, mid-terms, cramming, and Kitty dragging her to keggers. It was supposed to be the real world and her brother just...appearing in it without warning is like two worlds that aren't _ever_ supposed to meet.

“Sweet! Dr. Thunder!” He holds up the can in triumph and pops it open one-handed. “No one appreciates the off-brands like poor college students, amirite?”

“Danny, what are you doing here?”

“Well for starters, your locks are really flimsy. Like, all I had to do was put my picks in them and sneeze- it's a travesty,” He paused, tipped his head back and chugged what must have been half the can before letting out a content belch. “Ah, yeah. I'd talk to your landlord about that, or something, anybody could just walk right in.” He offered what was the left of the soda. “Backwash?”

She's almost grateful he's hedging- it feels natural to cross her arms and dust off her 'stern big-sister' look. “You know what I meant. What are you even doing in Connecticut?”

“What? A guy can't drive eleven hours to see his sister?”

“ _Danny.”_

“Jazz?”

The lights flick on and they both reel with surprise and blink owlishly.

“Oops, sorry.” Kitty says next to the switch. She has her faded, dye-lime hair let down for the night and looks too pale and frail with nothing but a flimsy top and panties.

Danny spits out his soda and coughs raggedly.

“It's fine Kitty, sorry if we woke you,” Jazz says. “This is my brother Danny. Danny, this is my roommate, Kitty.”

“Oh, so _you're_ the brother,” she nods, smirking as he blushes and clears his throat loudly. “Jazz talks about you a lot.”

He cards through his hair nervously. “Yeah, that's me. I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd drop in and surprise our big, Ivy-League grad.” He turns to Jazz and opens his arms up wide. “Uh... _surprise_!”

“Good job, Danny.” Jazz lauds him with a flat tone.

“Aw, that's sweet of ya,” Kitty cocks her hips and smiles coquettishly. “So you gonna...” Her eyes roam up his frayed jeans and don't seem to go any higher than his chest. “Be in town long, then?”

Oh _hell_ no, Jazz knew that look. The last thing this situation needed was Kitty leading her little-brother into another of her and Johnny's high-octane jealously-fueled love triangles.

Thankfully, Danny was more fidgeting shyly than showing any serious interest, “Probably not, sorry. I'm just here to pick Jazz up for a...family thing.”

Jazz can feel her heart-rate spike in her chest. Paranoia jumps into the driver seat and her hyperactive brain is already full of worse-case scenarios, each and every one of them overflowing with terror, blood, gruesome deaths, and nightmare-things with bone-cracking smiles and sanity-bending proportions.

No, Danny wouldn't be roughhousing with her or belching off-brand soda if the situation was that bad- which makes Jazz more annoyed than worried with this intrusion of volatile Fenton-weirdness into the tidy, normal life she's built for herself.

“Who said anything about me going anywhere?” Jazz demands.

“Well you didn't exactly give me a chance there, slugger,” Danny points out.

Kitty sounds more concerned with the entire thing than anyone. “Is this like, an emergency, or something?”

Jazz raises an eyebrow and rests the bat on her shoulder.

“No, it's nothing serious or anything,” he assures her. “Just a little family drama is all.” Danny looks Jazz in the eye and tells her, “Mom and Dad have been missing for a few days.”

The news doesn't seem to worry Jazz in the slightest, and Kitty looks between the brother and sister with genuine alarm and confusion because, oh right, _normal_ parents don't up and vanish for days at a time.

“So what, they're probably taking that rusted RV into the woods for another exciting scientific expedition to find Big Foot or the Jackalope, again.”

Danny shakes hi head. “No, you're not hearing me. Mom and Dad went on a Hunting Trip,” Danny enunciates the words. “And they haven't been home in a few days.”

Jazz's entire body goes very still. She doesn't break eye contact with Danny when she asks, “Kitty, would you excuse us, for a second?” 

* * *

 

She grabs Danny by the had and leads him to her room, locking the door behind them as if flicking on flimsy lock on a brass knob magically makes it soundproof. Setting the bat against the wall, Jazz massages her temples and tries to settle her nerves back into a place where she can think logically about all of this.

“I can't believe you still have this,” Danny's picks up the bat and examines it like an expert would regard some antique blade. “I think I was like, what, ten during that trip to Salt Lake City? Don't think anyone ever thought of soaking wood in salt water before.”

No one had, their parents had asked around. She'd been so so happy with their praises; being their clever little girl, and a chip off the ol' block.

Jazz snatches the bat away from him and sets it back to its probably place at her bedside. “You said Mom and Dad are missing. How long?”

“They missed their scheduled check-in six days ago. I didn't start to get worried until three days after that.”

Nine days, per procedure. They'd always had a thing for pagan numerology.

“It's not the first time a job made them drop off that radar, Danny,” Jazz reminds him. “Remember the Hellspawn in Damascus, or that Hungry Ghost in Locke? We didn't hear from them for a _month_ while they were chasing down that Yaoguai.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. This just feels...different.”

“So why didn't you go with them? Did you opt out or did they pull another 'leave the kids home alone to worry' act?”

“No,” Danny snaps, slightly miffed. “For your information, I was working a necromancy thing in Kentucky when they left.”

“Wait- by yourself? Since when have Mom and Dad let you go on hunts alone?”

“Since after _you_ left,” Danny returns bitterly.

All that old guilt she thought she'd forgotten wells up in her chest. “Danny,”she says gently. “You know my leaving had nothing to do with you or Danielle, don't you?”

“So why did you?”

“I wasn't abandoning you two, I was going off to college.”

“So? There were tons of colleges close by you could have gone to! Mom and Dad even offered take you up to a tour Wisconsin U! _You're_ the one who decided to go halfway across the country to get away from us!”

“To _Yale_ , Danny! Ivy-League! Someplace I could make a life for myself doing something _I_ want to do!”

“So you're really serious about this, huh?” He sweeps his hand over her desk, crowded with required reading and library books and a whirring, sleeping laptop. “You're gonna be some shrink, sit on a couch and take notes and get paid to listen to normal people complain about their lives?”

“Do you even _know_ what normal means, Danny?”

“Lemme think- uuuuuhhh... _boring_?”

“It means no monsters, Danny! It means no combat training, no smelting silver bullets, no near-evisceration in the woods or poltergeists breaking your collarbone! It means not having to hide a homemade tattoo because you're still a minor!”

The second it came out of her mouth she wants to snatch the words back and swallow them, have them cut her throat on their way down to mangle her guts because it would be better than seeing the shock and the hurt and the outrage of his face.

“You didn't just say that. No, no you are not seriously to complaining about-” He grits his teeth. “After what that thing did to Danielle?!”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that, you know how much I-”

“She looked up to you!” His fists are tight and his whole body vibrates with four years worth of things unsettled. “She needed you and you just- you just-”

He can't even finish the sentence, words fumbling uselessly out of his mouth. His shoulders dip like he's shrinking and he just looks so drained. They just stand there, looking at their feet or the long-titled spines of books, or anywhere except each other.

Jazz's voice comes out tentatively, a few degrees higher than a whisper. “How...how is she? I try call but she doesn't-” Jazz cuts herself off. As far as she's concerned she doesn't have the privilege.

Danny breathes steadily and nods to himself. “She's fine. Working a job in Des Moines.”

“Couldn't you and her-” Jazz attempts. “You two have always worked well together. Why not just meet up with her instead of coming to me?”

Danny shrugs. “You were closer. And you were on the way to the last place they were and I just thought-” He fingers play with a silver coin hanging off a leather cord around his neck. It was an old Greek drachma, one side with a depiction of Athena and the other her giant-eyed owl.

She remembers giving it to him the day she left for Yale.

“I just thought I could really use my big sister on this, y'know?” He meets her eyes warily; he has stubble from driving straight from Kentucky and he's taller than her now, but Jazz can't help but see a little boy looking at her with big, pleading blue eyes.

When Jazz makes her decision, she shuts down everything. Her guilt, her anxiety, her frustration, and the especially the regret already rearing its ugly head as she kneels down and drags a heavy chest out from under her bed. Wiping away the film of dust with her hand uncovers white runes of protection painted into the cedar. She pulls the key from under her shirt and puts it into the cold-iron lock.

“What were they hunting?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this universe, the Fentons are Hunters inhabiting the same world the Winchesters, but they're not replacing them. Characters and events from Supernatural will definitely be referenced, but the Fentons have their own thing going on that might tweak the canon, a bit. 
> 
> Expect more chapters, might even start up a 'Family Business' series, the possibilities are just way too much fun.


	2. Stick To Your Guns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thought it was fitting to post this on Danny Phantom's 10th Anniversary. Happy Dannyversary!

_Amity Park, Illinois: Then_

 

It's Tuesday, in that vague hour between night and morning. Jazz is standing in the living room rubbing sleep from her eyes while her father walks past with an armfull of medieval cutlery.

“Jack, Honey, I really don't think we need the halberd.”

“You'll change your tune when we run into a spectral knight someday, mark my words!”

Maddie lets out an tired but fond sigh. She reaches down to pick up the last bulging duffel bag off the floor. The leather straps of her gun harness peek from under the beaten denim jacket that is veteran of Wisconsin U, three children, and half an army of nightmares. Jazz feels childish and very much twelve in her pajamas.

“Sorry this is so last minute sweetie, but this Mogwai only appears once every nine years and if we miss our window now we won't have another chance until Danny and Danielle graduate.”

“When are you guys gonna be back?” Jazz asks. 'When' is the only word that she will consider; it is a powerful word that uses magic and denial to stave off sleepless nights and endless anxiety.

“Well, it's a good two day drive to Fremont, but we should probably be back next Friday, if everything goes as planned.”

The bag makes hugs awkward maneuver, but Maddie still manages it one-handed along with a peck on the cheek. The sawed-off Ithaca she puts into Jazz's hands feels like a dense, cumbersome thing and the girl looks down at it like she hasn't reassembled and fired it dozens of times before tonight.

“It's loaded with wrought-iron rounds mixed with salt, and I left a Beretta with silver rounds next to take-out menu box. Now, you have our emergency number, but when in doubt-”

“Call Mr. Lancer, I know, Mom.”

“Good. Remember, the house is in lockdown when we're gone, so that means-”

“Walk the twins to and from school, no going out after dark, no visits with friends, and no inviting anyone in- even people we know.” she recites.

Jack walks back in from the garage. “And what happens if something _does_ get in?”

Jazz cocks the shotgun. “Be a good host and feed it rocksalt and lead.”

“That's my girl.” Her father's arms are unburdened and huge, and his hugs are always warm and enveloping. “You're in charge of the homestead now, little missus. We're counting on you.”

“I know Daddy. Please be safe.”

“Aw, you know your old man, Jazzy Pants...”

“I know,” Jazz repeats. “ _Please_ be safe.”

Jack laughs, kisses the top of her forehead, and makes the floorboards groan under his heavy step as he walks back to the SUV parked outside.

Madde stops at the open door and turns back. “Take care of you brother and sister.”

* * *

 

 

 _New Haven, Connecticut: Now_  

 

“You know,” her brother says. “For somebody who doesn't hunt, you sure have a lot of hunting gear.”

Jazz's storage chest hangs open at the foot of her bed while she inventories her supplies on the bedspread: a fully stocked medical kit, three one-pound bags of salt, a one-quart Army canteen filled with Holy Water, a small leather pouch filled with amulets, protective charms, cat-eye shells, a pair of unfashionable iron rings.

“Does that mean that the dusty cigar box full of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in your closet sees a lot of action?”

“Hey, that's totally different. Those are collectibles.”

“Uh-huh,” She makes a dismissive noise, pulls a KA-BAR out of its sheath and runs her fingers carefully over the edge. Feels like the knives, stilettos, the hatchet, and the silver dagger were okay, but the machete and the bolo feel like they were due for quality sharpening, which they don't really have time for.

Hopefully they won't need to behead anything.

Jazz sets the blades she plans on taking into a duffel bag, picks up her sawed-off Mossberg, pulls back the pump-slide, and inspects the open action. “And for someone who dragging me on this hunt, you still haven't said anything about what Mom and Dad were after.”

The guns are in far better shape. Jazz makes sure to take them out for routine cleaning every few weeks whenever she has the apartment to herself. Best if Kitty didn't stumble onto her roommate tinkering with a fully loaded arsenal as if she was getting ready to shoot up the library for not having her research materials on hand. Still, the only thing worse than having a huge gun collection was having a poorly maintained gun collection. Or at least, that's what Mom always said.

Honestly, it's barely much of a gun collection. Just the shotgun, a Cherokee Compact, Walther P99, and a snub-nosed .38 revolver. Oh, and the hunting crossbow, but she already decided against taking that.

“What show have you been watching? Seriously, when was the last time we actually went into a job and knew _exactly_ what we were up against?”

“Good point,” Jazz admits. With usually nothing to go on but grisly deaths, ninety percent of hunting was book-work and playing amateur detective than the actual _hunting_ part.

Personally, she's always preferred the research over the execution.

The shotgun joins the rest of her supplies in the bag. “So what _do_ we have?”

Danny pulls out a bundle of papers folded one-time too many from his jacket and hands it to her. They're stiff, flat, and crushed from being stuck in a pocket for eight hundred miles.  Jazz unfolds them and lays them flat. Printed newspaper articles, maps, calendars, weather reports spanning back for months.

“String of deaths down in Somerset County,” Danny explains. “Seven high-school kids all committing suicide over the past ten weeks.”

Their faces are black and white and grainy from being an outdated printer, each one probably picked from piles of family photos. They all look too young to be anywhere near a high school. At least, younger than Jazz imagines she ever did at that age.

She glances over each of them, all rearranged paragraphs and different writing styles but all telling the same story, over and over, and the sheer volume of it all helps Jazz wrap herself into a professional, clinical mindset. “Copycat suicides aren't unheard of, but to have this many this fast...”

“Yeah, either _Heathers_ is making a comeback, or-”

“Or there's something not natural going on down there,” Jazz finishes the thought. “Is there anything connecting them all that stands out?”

“That's a problem with the small towns, they've got too many things in common. Same school, same general neighborhood, same age group, looks like some the same social circles, too.”

“What about the method? Any consistency in how they died?”

Danny spreads out the articles and indicates the highlighted parts, notated with his own scribbles. “Take your pick. Hanging, pills, slit wrist, daddy's Glock. Looks like they just offed themselves with whatever was handy.”

Jazz starts sorting through a mental list of the most likely suspects, but there were just too many possibilities. Funny how them dying normal, tragic deaths did not come up as one of them. It's something Hunters have to be careful about, why walking into the den of nightmares goes hand in hand with mental breakdowns and empty bottles of Jack Daniels. Face enough monsters, you start seeing monsters everywhere. 

It was always one the things Jazz excelled at- spotting the red herrings, seeing patterns that others missed. Even at first glance, it's obvious: either something is killing off teens and making it look like suicide, or something is compelling them to. “Doesn't narrow down the suspects. We could be dealing with malevolent spirits, Bozaloshtsh, Crocotta, even -” the words tumble out faster than she can think, chest full of this sharp, lurking dread. “Demonic Possession.”

Danny shakes his head and pretends to not notice her breath of relief. “No, it's definitely not the Fergies. None of the usual omens. No freak storms, cattle deaths, locust parties or the anything like that.”

She mutters out a “Thank God,” and then says it again in Latin for good measure. “It's still not exactly a lot to go on, Danny.”

“We've gone further for a lot less. Mom and Dad thought it was enough to check out.”

He's right, of course. New Jersey was practically next door, she couldn't ask for a more convenient hunt close enough to drive to and back before classes on Monday. As far as Jazz was concerned, that didn't change the situation. “And now they're missing, you wanna blindly run after something that would make _Mom and Dad_ up and vanish for whatever reason, and I'm crazier than everyone in this family for agreeing to get dragged into this even though I _know_ it's crazy.”

“But you're still going,” he grins a smug, little brother grin at her.

“Yeah, coming out of retirement for one last job. That always go well in every movie ever.”

“Ah, stop worrying so much, Jazz, it'll work out. There's a formula to these things: grisly exotic deaths, road trip, boring research, plot twist, gank evil thing, and then we ride off into the sunset having learned a valuable lesson about...I dunno, honesty or friendship or some such nonsense.”

“Just shut up and help me pack.”

They settle into a old rhythm, not a step lost as if it were just old times again; Dani and Dad on the other side of the country having a light-hearted, father-daughter hunt for a rogue Keelut while Mom waits downstairs, timing them loudly with a stop-watch. Together they organize their supplies, check and recheck the weapons, make sure the box of wrought-iron rounds and the regular ones are properly labeled, all the while prioritizing for space because no, Danny, I don't think we're going to need the fifty-feet of climbing rope, why do we need climbing rope? We're going to New Jersey, not the Rockies. No, the Boondock Saints will never be a valid reason now put that back we need room for the flare gun. Yes, the flare gun, don't argue with me, flares save lives.

Years of practice refines the entire process to mere ten minutes. Jazz zips the duffel bag shut and hefts it experimentally. It's heavy enough that she's glad she kept up a decent fitness regimen along with her courseload, more out of ingrained habit than dedication.

“Okay,” she tells him. “Give me five to change, I'll meet you out there.”

She digs out her old camping backpack from her closet and starts packing as if she really were just leaving for a normal family weekend. Two pairs of jeans, two shirts, two pairs of socks, two more sets of underwear, and an extra outfit just in case, because she's obsessive that way.

A small black travel kit is already prepacked with deodorant, a cheap electric toothbrush, toothpaste, a comb, and little travel-size soap and shampoo bottles. It's all there, set when she first moved in years ago, like she always knew that she'd get a late night phone call or a surprise visit; all packed at a moment's notice like some kind of minuteman.

Is she just fooling herself, thinking that she's done with all of this? Danny shows up without warning at two in the morning and within half an hour she's stuffing guns and sharp things into a bag ready to chase down their wayward parents to _New Jersey._

Even though they're probably perfectly fine. Even though they have a penchant for disappearing for days while neglecting to mention to their children that they hadn't died.

Even though she has class on Monday, an exam on cross-cultural psychology on Tuesday, and a mid-term proposal due on Wednesday.

Jazz blinks, realizing she's been standing in the middle of her room blankly. Reminds herself to focus, that she promised Danny she would help and that's what she'll do, reservations or no. There'll be plenty of time to berate and psychoanalyze herself over this sudden relapse later. Not much else do to on a three hour drive.

Best not dwell on how her priority is 'help Danny' as opposed to, say, 'find missing parents'. Latent filial hostility is at least a feeling comfortable in its familiarity.

She slips out of her pjs and rummages around her wardrobe for good traveling clothes. There's a faded pair of jeans buried at the bottom of a drawer so broken in that they slip smooth and snug on her hips like a glove. The shirt is long-sleeved and plain black- cheap, simple and not something she'd mind getting ruined. Just in the middle of shoving her arms into the it, she freezes when she sees herself in the mirror.

A pentagram ringed by Hebrew sigils is tattooed on her clavicle, as close to the heart as she'd allowed. That had been the only consideration her mother had given her.

Jazz can't help but rub the spot, trace the lines of black ink as if it were days old and still fresh and sore. She'd been sixteen when her parents had called in an artist from their circle of contacts to apply it in the family basement. The twins had been thirteen.

She wishes she could call it another one of their overreactions, but she can't. Not after her baby sister snuck into her room in the dead of night and cried herself to sleep in her arms.

All wishing does is make her feel like a terrible sister. Then again, Danielle hasn't returned any of her calls since she left for Yale years ago, so Jazz is pretty sure she's a terrible sister anyway.

The tattoo disappears when she finishes pulling on the shirt. Not out of mind, but it helps.

Hiking up one of her pant legs, Jazz straps the least conspicuous of the stilettos to her calf and secures the Cherokee in a holster set on the small of her back. It's a bit harder to draw quickly but it's a more discreet, which reminds her to pack one of her fake conceal-carry permits. Thank you, Jersey.

She throws on her favorite denim jacket, cozy and durable and just putting it on makes her feel as secure as putting on body armor, even if Kitty teases her about it being something from an eighties thrift store. Tying her hair back, Jazz does one last double-check in the mirror before shouldering her hunting gear and follows the voices coming from the direction of the living room.

Danny's standing awkwardly in the middle of the kitchen while Kitty talks at him, the substance of her words not mattering so much as the way she oh-so-innocently leans back against the counter, tank hiking up and showing off her pale midriff. Also she still hasn't gotten around to putting on pants.

Jazz lets him squirm just a bit longer; monosyllabic, red-earned, and furtively not-looking at anything resembling Kitty's legs before she finally takes pity on him.

“Ready to go?”

“God Yes!” Danny blurts out quickly, and stammers at Kitty with flushed cheeks. “I mean...yeah, all ready to get going.” He lunges almost desperately for the black backpack waiting by the door. “It was uh...really nice meeting you Kitty.”

“Likewise,” Her smile becomes more genuine than flirtatious.“You remember to bring her back, okay? It'll take me forever to find a new roommate I can stand.”

“Bet on it.”

“I shouldn't be long,” Jazz tells her. “Probably be home late Sunday or early Monday.”

“Oh,” Kitty says. “Yeah. Okay, sounds good.”

She turns to follow Danny out the door, but Kitty brushes her hand on the back of Jazz's shoulder. “Um...you sure everything's okay, Jazz?”

She turns to Kitty, confused by the question and this nagging sensation of d _éjà vu_ until she sees the unease of her roommate's face. Kitty has been rooming with another Jazz for three years, a Jazz that spends long nights at her laptop surrounded by piles of psychology texts, who nags at Kitty over the state of the dishes or the volume of her stereo. A Jazz that let her cry on her shoulder from Johnny's latest infidelity, a Jazz she dragged to parties to try and loosen her up, a Jazz who held her hair back when she puked through her hangovers.

She doesn't know this Jazz, the one with the scars, tattoos to ward of demons, duffel bags full of guns and a pocket full of dead faces. Kitty doesn't see any of those things, but somehow she still knows that the Jazz standing in their kitchen isn't her Jazz.

Jazz reads all of this from the worry in Kitty's eye, and abruptly remembers why the situation felt so familiar.

It felt strange to be on the other side, for once.

“It's probably nothing,” Jazz tries to assures her. “Really. They're probably out in some National Park and forgot to recharge their cell phones. Happens all the time with them.”

“If you say so,” Kitty bites her lip.

“Hey,” Jazz hugs her with her free arm. Kitty holds her tightly. “I told you, I'll be back on Monday. You really think I'd let my brother make me miss class?”

Kitty snorts a laugh into Jazz's shoulder. “Yeah, good point.”

When the hug finally ends, there's a strained pause when no one says a word, just looking at each other, until Kitty's finally the one who asks, “There's something you're not telling me, isn't there?”

Jazz adjusts the strap of her duffel bag full of guns. “It's...complicated.”

“What isn't complicated with you?” She rolls her eyes. “Honestly, you've met my parents. How much worse can your family stuff be?”

“I could make a career out of it.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Kitty leans back against the counter coyly. “They don't seem that bad so far...”

“Yeah, while we're on the subject, how about the next time one of my relatives visits you maybe _not_ be half-naked?”

“What?” She says innocently. “Danny and I were just talking.”

Jazz crosses her arms and gives Kitty the Look. She knows the one.

“Oh come, he's such an adorable little puppy, how could I resist?”

The Look persists.

Kitty huffs. “Fine, fine, your little brother's off limits I got, already. Geez.”

Jazz rests her arms and her sides and smiles sweetly. “Nice to hear it. Try to give me an apartment to come back to, okay?”

“I keep telling I have no idea how those panty-hose ended up clogging the drain, they weren't even mine!”

“Uh-huh,” she makes the same dismissive noise she gave her brother on her way out.

Kitty calls out just as she leaves, “Hey, doesn't Danny have a twin sister, too?”

Jazz slams the door shut.

Danny's leaning against the wall, waiting for her. He cracks a grin.

“Ready to go?” Jazz asks.

“Hey, waiting on you sis,” he shrugs.

She brushes past him and heads down the narrow, winding stairs to the bottom floor. The wood is chipped, beaten, and always creaks at comings and goings of all of the student tenants at all hours, but their footfalls barely make a noise at all.

The air outside has a light spring breeze, with just enough leftover winter for Jazz to be grateful for her coat. Past two, most of the parties are winding down and the only other people are a pack of girls on the other side of the street walking awkwardly from high heels and drink names with too many syllables. Yellow streetlights stain the cracked parking lot asphalt like the air is jaundiced.

“Are we taking your car?” Jazz looks around the lot in askance.

“We can try if you want,” Danny pulls out a pair of driving gloves as he walks down a row of cars, smirking proudly as he stops right next to a sleek black motorcycle. “But that might be a bit tricky to pull off.”

Jazz knows exactly enough about bikes to know that the sleek, gunmetal black machine Danny was beaming next to was a modern rendition harkening back to the American classics.

“Is that thing yours?”

“Pretty sweet, right?” He pats it lovingly. “'04 Honda Phantom: four-stroke single-cylinder engine, sixteen-point-four-eight horses at eight thousand rpm, six speed transmission-”

“Don't forget completely impractical,” Jazz says. “Please don't tell me you drove all the way from Kentucky on that.”

“Technically I rode this from Illinois to Kentucky, _then_ to here.”

The Look makes a resurgence.

“Oh come on Jazz, this is a cruiser! These babies were made for cross-country.”

“That doesn't mean it was made for _hunting_ , Danny. It offers zero protection, it's useless in bad weather, and not only are those saddle bags barely big enough to fit even basic supplies, I'd hardly call them secure enough to-”

Danny raises his hands like he's trying to physically fend of her lecture. “Okay, okay, I get it! Geez. Leave it to you to take all the fun out of a kickass bike.”

“I can't even believe Mom even let you get that thing in the first-” Saying it aloud practically answers her own question, because of course there was no way Danny could have gotten a motorcycle through their _parents._ “It was Uncle Vlad, wasn't it?”

“So what if he did?” Danny huffed crossly. “He got a Kawasaki for Danielle too for our eighteenth.”

“So, it doesn't bother you where that money he used to buy them came from?”

“Why would it?”

“Because he's a _profiteer,_ Danny! Hunters risk their lives trying to save people from being slaughtered by monsters and demons, and he's skirting the edges pawning off any occult artifact he can get his hands on!”

“Yeah, well people have different reactions when they find out what's really out there. Mom and Dad grabbed their scalpels and shotguns, Uncle Vlad decided to hit the Supernatural Antique Roadshow. Most people just up and run away, but we try not to blame them for that, either.”

It was an easy shot- but that didn’t make it strike any less accurately. “I just don't trust him Danny. Neither does Mom.”

“Well Dad does, and so do Elle and me. Just because he doesn't get his hands dirty doesn't mean he doesn't help us whenever we ask.”

She wants to argue that Vlad Masters never helped anyone unless he somehow benefited from it, but she knows it's a losing battle. He was their Godfather; taught them how wits are lies were as valuable tools as silver bullets, always showed up with souvenirs from his world-trotting 'business trips,' defused all the bad blood during the holidays, and never failed to send the perfect birthday present, every year. He'd even encouraged Jazz shoot for Ivy lLague- though she'd turned down his offers to 'lessen the burden.'

It's hard to think bad of family. Jazz just has had more practice at it.

She raises her hands in surrender. “Okay, fine, whatever, we're wasting time arguing over Uncle Vlad giving you some extravagant birthday present that we can't even use. How about go there together in my car?”

Danny accepts the peace offering with a nod while she fumbles her keys out and points the remote at a row of cars nearby.

The lights of a robin egg blue Prius flash between a Lancer and a old Cadillac.

Danny immediately turns and climbs onto his bike. “Nope.”

“What? What's wrong with my car?”

“Jazz, we're hunters! We drive Jeeps, and muscle cars, pickup trucks and,” he slaps the Phantom's gas tank under him. “Badass motorcycles! We don't go around ganking ghouls in some... _lunchbox_!”

“Well this 'lunchbox' gets over fifty miles to the gallon! And it sure has more trunk space than that little insurance liability you're sitting on.”

“I'm going to pretend you didn't say that,” Danny lifts his head haughtily as he puts his head into a black helmet from his backpack.

“Oh come on Danny, you're being ridiculous. We're headed to the same place, it's stupid to drive separt-”

The Phantom rouses awake with a explosive rumble.

“I'm sorry I insulted the bike, okay? It's a very nice bike. I'm just saying it'd also be nice for us to go _together_ and maybe catch up a-”

Twisting the throttle, the revving engine quickly drowns Jazz out. Danny points to the side of his helmet where his ear would be. “Sorry! I can't hear you over my insurance liability!”

Jazz has to actively resist the urge to stop her foot. “Oh haha, aren't you hilarious. What are you, _five_?”

“Vroom vroom!” Danny slaps the visor of his helmet over his face and peels out of the parking lot, rocketing inches past Jazz and punctuating the predawn quiet with a roaring engine and screeching rubber.

She coughs on exhaust and scowls at his shrinking red taillight. “Jerk.”

 

* * *

 

The drive is a little over two hours- most of it barreling down the I-95 at a pace not slow enough to lose time, but not fast enough to attract any attention. Which is not something you want to do when you have an arsenal in the back of your car.

For someone who grew up traveling cross-country in a Winnebago, the drive feels more like a commute. Road trips were a staple of Jazz's childhood, along with monsters, training to kill monsters, and then cross-country road trips on the _way_ to kill monsters; sometimes interspersed with camping, disproving phony haunted houses, and Rush mix-tapes.

Two hours is more than enough time for her to contemplate just what the actual _hell_ she's doing.

Simple. She's driving across state lines with a trunk crammed full with guns of questionable legality with her brother trying to find their missing parents who'd vanished while investigating some kind of supernatural predator possibly killing its way through the student body of a New Jersey high school.

She stopped hunting for a reason- why she packed her bags and put six states between herself and her parents. Normal, well-adjusted people don't hunt monsters. There is a long list of professions that attract an inordinate amount of the distributed, the damaged, and the outright psychopathic, and the only reason Hunters aren't the most prominent on that list is simple PR. That, and people not believing that monsters were real.

That isn't her. She doesn't want that to be her, and more than anything she didn't want that for her baby brother and sister.

And that's really the crux of it, why she's doing all of this: guilt. She got away from the Life, got away from it damaged but still able to live in the outside world, and she wanted to help people in ways that didn't involve death, blood, and nightmares.

Except she had to leave her little brother and sister behind to do it.

Because leaving just isn't an option for them. Danny's only relationships outside of the family were a Hunter ex-girlfriend and a computer genius dangling over the crevice of full-blown agoraphobia, and their little sister was a broken girl barely held together by the belief that if she killed enough monsters she'd finally be able to sleep soundly, again.

They have nothing else, no interests or passions or experience outside of the life their parents had reared them all into. Her Mom and Dad were good people, probably saved dozens if not hundreds of innocent lives, but as much as Jazz loved them as a daughter, as a sister she utterly _despised_ them. Which didn't really help much with her guilt there, either.

Her headlights pass across a big sign welcoming her to Garden State, with Danny's Phantom still in the lead. Wanting to just empty her head and autopilot the rest of the way, Jazz cranks up the radio.

“ _Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright, they just seem a little weeeeeeeeird.”_

On second thought, she shuts it off.

 

* * *

 

They settle into a crap motel just outside of town- another staple of Jazz's life on the road when the Winnebago wasn't feasible for a hunt.

At the desk, Danny slaps down a credit card with a fake name and Jazz does to best to ignore the lewd look the motel manager gives them. At least with Danny and Danielle people saw the family resemblance right away.

Even exhausted and road-weary, they drag all their gear into the room and go through the procedure to make it safe for habitation. They use the compass app on their phones to place protective amulets and charms in the proper cardinal directions, place devil's shoestring herbs over the doorframe, hide knives and guns in arms' reach of the beds, and top it off with a 'Do Not Distrub' sign to keep housekeeping from coming in and calling the cops on them.

Home sweet home.

Jazz gets first stab at the shower because she's older and had to deal with _somebody_ breaking into her apartment at two in the morning, but she's out of practice with how motels are so of course the hot waters gives out halfway through with shampoo still in her hair.

After dressing and brushing her teeth, she comes out of the bathroom and finds Danny on his bed, cleaning the black BUL M-5 with the custom white grip their parents had gotten him for his sixteenth.

“Hot water's out,” Jazz tells him.

“I'll shower in the morning,” he loads a magazine, pulls back the slide, and checks the safety. “Or...y'know... _later_ in the morning.”

“We should probably get some sleep. We've got work to do.”

He nods. “Yeah.”

They both check the locks three times before settling into bed. By five Danny's on his side and snoring while Jazz is wide awake, sitting crossed-legged with her laptop on the bed and a leatherbound journal balanced on her knees. She knows she won't get any sleep tonight, and has all of the case's research laid out on the bedspread along with a dozen new tabs of her own research open on the computer.

Well, she planned on pulling an all-nighter this weekend, anyways.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative Chapter Title: 'Damn it Kitty put some pants on.' Yes, Danny drives a Honda Phantom. It's a real motorcycle, and you have no idea how giddy I was to discover it. I was also THIS close to making the usual 'first five minutes' of the monster killing off some poor, unlucky guy, but I like the idea of starting every chapter with pieces of the Fenton's lives before all of this started. It will probably be a theme.
> 
> Things are going to start picking up now- we're going to get into the real meat a bones of the story. You know, the grisly exotic deaths, the investigation, plot twist, gank evil thing, they find their parents, there's family bonding, and Jazz finally gets reconciliation and closure.
> 
> ....yeah this is also a Supernatural fic so HAHAHA nope. 
> 
> I'm sure you guys have figured out what happened to Danielle, since I did everything but write it on a two-by-four and smack you over the head with it, and yes, you are all going to hate me when we get to that part eventually. 
> 
> This is the first major multi-chapter fic I've committed to in a long time, and I'm going to do my best and see it through. Thanks for reading, feel free to submit questions or comments.


	3. Fire of Unknown Origin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait between chapters. A lot of content this time around, so hopefully that will make up for it. In case you may had forgotten the previous chapter, Danny and Jazz are going to be investigating something Supernatural that is causing suicides, so fair warning.

_Hobart, Wisconsin: Then_  

The backseats of the old modified Suburban may be big enough to fit Jazz and the twins, but no amount of legroom would ever be enough to contain a pair of ten year olds bouncing with three hours worth of pent-up energy once the expensive houses started passing by the windows. Soon as the chorus of 'are we there yet' and 'how long how long how long' starts, Jazz presses up against door and cranks up the volume on her old CD player and drowns them out with _Pirate Radio_ for the rest of the trip.

Danny and Danielle strain to escape their seat belts when Dad turns off of the main road into what is essentially a long, narrow driveway running through twenty acres of woodlands. A wrought-iron gate opens automatically as they drive up. Jazz can grasp maybe half of what's been etched into the metal to appear archaically artsy to the uninitiated.

The villa was as much a fortress as a mansion. Two stories worth of imported stonework consecrated and warded against every conceivable and - more importantly- every _inconceivable_ threat. Spellwork had always been more Uncle Vlad's forte than Hunting.

Well, that and money. Lots and lots of money.

Dad barely has time to bring the SUV to a full stop before the twins are already spilling out and making a run for the wood and iron door that had probably been part of a honest-to-God castle at some point. They take turns with the snarling dragon knocker and pounce before its even partway open.

“UncleVladUncleVladUncleVlad!”

He lets out a surprised _'ooff'_ from the double tackle-hug and chuckles graciously, “There's my little troublemakers! Keeping your parents on their toes, I trust?”

They grin nearly identical, conspiratory grins and giggle. Danielle is going through another short-hair phase; without the curves the puberty the only differences are the softer, rounder edges of Dani's face over her brother's.

Doesn't help that they're both wearing their favorite 'I'm the Evil Twin' shirts.

Her mother climbs out of the Suburban sorely and says, “You know them, a handful since the day they were born.”

“I seem to remember a certain young lady who thought that two little ones would only be _twice_ as hard as her unusually well-behaved firstborn.”

“Poor girl didn't know what hit her,” she shakes her head. “You're looking well, Vlad.”

Vlad extricates himself from Danny and Danielle and smooths out the wrinkles of his charcoal Milano suit. “Madeline,” he says fondly. “And you're looking lovely as-”

“VLADDY!” Jack's bear-hugs are eerily like his youngest two, only several times larger and forceful enough for Vlad's thousand-dollar shoes to dangle several inches over the pavement. “How've you been, you old pirate? Feels like we haven't seen in each other in ages!”

Vlad manages to wheeze. “My ribs remember you just fine, Jack.”

“Oops,” Jack sets him down. “Sorry, V-Man.”

“Nothing a few weeks in traction won't fix,” Vlad swivels his hips and arches back with audible pops. “Now if I'm not mistaken, I think we're still missing someone.”

“Jaaaazz!” Madeline calls, with an edge of warning. “Come and say 'Hi' to your Uncle Vlad who's being nice enough to let you stay in his big, expensive house!”

Jazz lets out a dramatic sigh they can hear from across the driveway and untangles her headphones out of her hair.

“Someone seems to be in a mood,” Vlad notes.

“Jazz was under the impression that Jack and I were leaving the terrors with you and taking her with us to Florida,” Maddie explains.

“But _I'm_ the one that figured out that the only way to kill a Chullachaqui is with a copper blade dipped in goat's blood!”

“And you still need to figure out the difference between research and practical experience, young lady,” Maddie says sharply. “The everglades are dangerous enough without a bloodthirsty shapeshifter stalking you.”

Unmoved, Jazz crosses her arms over her chest and very maturely pouts over an unjust situation.

Jack leans down and pats her back. “Don't be so glum, Jazzy-pants! Think of the great time you're gonna have with your Uncle Vlad!”

“I _do_ like to think I'm more fun than a muggy swap full of mosquitoes and man-eating monsters,” Vlad adjusts his tie primly.

“Kids,” Maddie says. “Why don't you bring up your bags from the truck so you can get you settled in?”

“Kay!” The twins chorus, and turn to race back to the militarized Chevy.

Vlad clears his throat. “Badger? Bunny? Forgetting something?”

He holds out his hand expectantly. Heads hanging in defeat, Danny slaps Vlad's wallet into his palm, Danielle turning over stainless steel wristwatch. They grumble and trudge back towards the truck while Vlad smugly clasps the Vostok back around his wrist. “You two are going to have to get more creative if you want to get one on your ol' Uncle Vlad.”

“I wish you hadn't taught them that,” Maddie sighs. “Or at least stopped encouraging them, as much.”

“Just a little harmless sleight-of-hand, Madeline.” Vlad conjures a silver dollar with a flick of the hand, walks it across his knuckles, and turns over his open palm, the coin gone like it evaporated. He winks. “Right Jasmine?”

Their bulging duffels piled on the driveway, Maddie and Jack fuss over their children- reminding them to be on their best behavior, not to stay up too late, and to keep up with their schoolwork and self-defense training. The Dannny and Danielle squirm as they're hugged; overeager for a parent-less vacation a mansion full of video games even though they'll be miserable and homesick before the week is even over.

Maddie perches her aviators on her forehead and looks at Vlad with her bare eyes. “Thanks again for agreeing to watch them on such short notice. It means a lot to us.”

“Think nothing of it,” Vlad assures them. “Are you sure you can't come in for few minutes, at least? I have a new Italian espresso maker that will make the first leg down I-43 a little more tolerable.”

“Ooooh, fancy coffee...” Jack rubs his palms together eagerly.

“Jack,” Maddie warns. “You remember last time.”

“Oh come, hun, we made it to California in record time!”

“Jack,” Maddie says again, tone unchanged.

He slumps. “Yes, dear.”

Maddie lowers her aviators back down. “We shouldn't be any longer than ten days. We know you've got a busy schedule, so if you don't hear from us by then, call Edward Lancer and he'll come up and take the kids off your hands.”

“Nonsense,” Vlad waves his hand dismissively. “What kind of Godfather would I be if I didn't put family first? You just worry about coming home safe, I'll take care the rest.

Vlad leans into the goodbye kiss Madeline pecks onto his cheek and tolerates another bone crushing hug from Jack. Hands clasped behind his back, Vlad watches at the departing Suburban while all three of the Fenton children wave frantically.

The moment the gates and the truck is out of sight, he claps his hands together and says, “Change of plans, children! Who wants to take a ride on Uncle Vlad's private jet and help him on a little _treasure hunt_?”

Danny and Danielle gasp delightedly and high-five each other. “Yay! Treasure hunt!”

Vlad looks over to Jazz. “Not a word of this to your mother.”

 

* * *

 

 _Somerset County, New Jersey: Now_  

The only comfort of being stuck in some ratty motel room in middle of New Jersey is sharing it with her brother. It's been so long she'd actually forgotten how it felt to really share space with someone. Sure, she has the apartment with Kitty. They argue about dishes, go to parties, snuggle on the couch with ice cream and bad movies when she's on another “break” with Johnny, but at the end of the night they have their separate rooms and their separate beds and their own, private darkness.

For the first time since she left home, there's a sense of safety Jazz feels from something as normal as typing on her computer while Danny snores in the bed next to hers. Like...taking in a breath after holding it for so long. Just a sense of relief from nothing more than the presence of someone you trust.

Her entire time at college, she'd shared a bed with exactly two other people. (Well...technically three. It was complicated). But never overnight, never at her place. Some things were just incompatible with normal relationships. Like waking up at random intervals to check and recheck the locks and wards, needing at least three weapons in easy reach. The nightmares.

Jazz spent the entire night in bed propped up against the headboard and sharing with her laptop and a night's worth of research, never quite settling down into a restful sleep. The room was just too unfamiliar; too many uncategorized noises, too many shifting shadows. More than a few times she woke up, hand on the pommel of the knife tucked under her pillow until she recognizes Danny's breathing in the dark like an old song, then fitfully settles back to sleep.

It make all the difference in the world, having someone to share nightmares with.

Before long her next semiconscious thought knows that it's morning from all the light leaking through the curtain and her eyelids. The circulatory whoosh of traffic going past outside is heavier, and her insides are twisting in knots from hunger. She refuses to open her eyes and buries her head into her pillow.

The door slams and Jazz startles like a hair trigger, Ka-Bar out and ready. Danny is standing next to the door holding a plastic bag from the corner Wawa, cackling and well out of stabbing range. He throws the curtains open and blinds her with the morning light.

“Rise and Shine, Jazzy-pants!”

Jazz cringes and tries to rub out sand and sunshine out of her eyes. “What time is it?”

“Nearly eight! Come on, we’re burning daylight!”

 _Eight?_ She blinks blearily and finds confirmation on the nightstand clock that looks to be a refugee from the Reagan administration. She tries to sort out a rough estimation of how much sleep she might have managed, but honestly can't even remember when exactly she dozed off.

Danny surveys her nest of scribbled notebook paper and newspaper articles. “Geez, Jazz. How long were you up with that stuff?”

“Not sure,” She shrugs. “It's okay, I've done worse for midterms.”

“Staying up all night writing papers. Gosh, college life sounds like a blast. I'm mad jealous.”

“You stay up all night digging up _graves,_ Danny.”

“Yeah, and then I get to set things on _fire_ when I'm done. That's a little something called 'job satisfaction.'"

Jazz extracts herself from her bed without upsetting her research pile and stretches her arms over her head. She may be used to all-nighter's but one of the perks of not being a freshman anymore was being able to schedule her courses _not_ in the early morning. Great, even by college standard's she's gone soft. Her stomachs gurgles, and Jazz remembers she hasn't eaten anything since late yesterday.

“So, what are our plans for breakfast?” Her back pops while she arches back. Probably not enough time for her morning routine.

“Here,” he takes something out of the bag and tosses it to her. “Breakfast on the go. We've got a lot of ground to cover today, so eat fast.”

Jazz holds up the package like one of their Dad's expired military rations. “Pop-Tarts?”

“ _Cinnamon_ Pop Tarts. Only the best, here in Casa de Fenton.”

“This is breakfast for you?”

“What?” He almost looks offended on the Pop-Tarts' behalf. “It's a breakfast food.”

“There things have no nutritional value Danny. Less than nothing. It's negative nutrition.”

“Sure they do! They've got uh...they're chock full of vitamins and carbs and cinnamon sugar and...uh...” He turns over the package and squints. “And your daily recommend dose of riboflavin, thiamine hydrochloride, and TGHQ.” He rechecks the label. “'For freshness.'”

Jazz crosses her arms over her chest, less than impressed.

“See? Wha'd I say?” He points at the nutritional info. “Thiamin hydrosomething. Everything a growing girl needs.”

She throws the Pop-Tarts back to him, aiming for his face and ignores his frantic scrambling and juggling as she digs out a fresh outfit from her backpack. “How about this: I'm going to get changed, and when I come out we are finding a nice sit-down diner and having a _real_ breakfast.”

“Not that the early bird special and some antiquing doesn't sound just delightful, but we're kind of on the tight schedule looking Mom and Dad. Remember them, Jazz? Our parents? The ones that are missing? This sort of thing tends to have a time factor.”

Scooping up her clothes, she tells him on her way to the bathroom. “Countless studies have consistently proven that people perform better throughout the day with a complete, balanced breakfast.”

Danny waves the Pop-Tarts at her. “ _Freshness_ Jazz!”

“Doesn't count.” Jazz slams the bathroom door in his face and applies a perfect bead of toothpaste to her electric travel brush.

From the other side of the door Danny makes frustrated noises through grit teeth. “God, I forgot how much of an anal control-freak you are!”

“Detail-oriented!” Jazz tells the door with a foaming mouth.

“Right, sorry, you're right: I meant gargantuan _nerd_!”

Jazz counts to one hundred twenty seconds as she brushes, spits her toothpaste in the sink and says, “You say nerd, I say 'space camp'.”

Danny growls, kicks at the door and stomps away, grumbling.

 

* * *

 

She drags Danny to a small fifties-style diner, tables all burnished chrome and tired linoleum with washcloth streaks glaring under florescent. The morning crowd is a sparse picking of retirees and twenty-somethings nursing hangovers with greasy food and dark sunglasses. They pick a booth completely unappealing to anyone except the paranoid: away from windows, backs to a corner, and closest to the kitchen's back door.

Jazz barely has room for her omelet with her laptop, notes, and leather-bound Hunter's Journal taking up most of the space on her side of the table, and she eats absently while she reviews her work. Danny is more focused on dismantling his tower of french toast with the ruthless efficiency of someone skilled with sharp implements. Jazz slices another piece of omelet with her fork and smiles as her brother demolishes his second plate.

It's important not to gloat about these things.

“Enjoying breakfast?”

Danny looks up from his food and glares at her. The puffy, french-toasted stuffed cheeks makes him look more like a grumpy chipmunk. Or a badger.

She snorts back a laugh and goes back to work on her breakfast without meeting his eyes.

Danny is through half of his second helping by the time Jazz finishes her omelet. Moving her plate aside, she starts rounding up her research. “So I was thinking.”

“Heeeere we go,” Danny mumbles with a full mouth.

“ _So I was thinking_ ,” Jazz continues. “The best way to find Mom and Dad is to work the case like they would- retrace their steps up to the point where they dropped off the grid.”

Danny swallows. “Sounds like a plan. How about _you_ do that, and I'll case the town for actual leads.”

“Great idea. Let's split up in the same town where two way more experience hunters have already disappeared. Because splitting up _always_ works out.”

“Then we should be focusing on finding them before the trail runs cold! There hasn't been any reported adult suicides in months- nevermind anyone matching their description in the county morgue. So whatever Nasty is lurking around this town hasn't gotten them yet. Either they're laying low, or they skipped town. Hell, for all we know they might've already finished the job and just went off without telling us. Wouldn't be the first time.”

“You really think Mom and Dad are pulling full radio-silence on account of a hunt they already finished?”

“...yeah okay you got a point there. And the splitting up thing. Maybe. Too soon to tell. I still say we should be chasing down leads.”

“By doing what? Run all over town waving Mom and Dad's picture around without having any idea what their covers were? Face it, Danny, the only lead we know for sure is the case they were working on. If we work it ourselves, we might stumble onto clue about what happened.”

“Emphasis on ' _might_ ',” he stabs a huge piece of french toast and chews sulkily. “So did all that late night cramming give us any better idea what the hell we 'might' dealing with?”

“Well...not exactly, but I think I might have established a pattern in its...” She rustles through her scribbles. “I mean, it's a bit thin, but I found some lore about Aokigahara that has _some_ similarity to-” Jazz trails off, trying to the sort through the mess her sleep-deprived brain left behind last night. That is, this morning. Danny props on elbow on the table, chewing with slow relinquishment. She sighs. “Yeah okay I got nothing.”

He hoots triumphantly. “What? You mean Mom's little book-bear couldn't find all the answers in her monster-diary?”

“This journal is full of years of lore and research and is-” Jazz reaches for it in her pile of notes so she can wave it around a little to punctuate her point, but her hand only finds loose, scribbled pages from her all-night Google-binge.

Danny's leaning back in his seat, casually reading Jazz's journal.

Times like this she really hates how well the twins took to Uncle Vlad's lessons.

“Oh man,” he guffaws, like he's reading the Sunday Funnies. “I forgot all about this thing.” He turns over the journal and shows her a page. “Is that supposed to be a Flying Head? Does this thing even have real monsters in it or am I playing 'Who's that P _okémon_?'”

Okay _fine,_ Jazz's research is thorough and her handwriting meticulously squeezes as much info as possible on the lines. It's just that the illustrations are just a little bit...crude.

“Koffing, it's definitely Koffing.”

“Give it back, Danny.”

“Or it could be Ghastly! That's it, isn't it? we're dealing with a _ghost_ Pokémon. I don't know if we can handle something like that Jazz, we're gonna need a guy with a dorky hat that wants to catch 'em all. I'll call Tucker I think he's been preparing for this moment his whole life.”

“I'm serious Danny, give it _back_.”

She makes a grab for it but Danny edges away, flipping to a random page. “No way I'm not done yet there could be something in here that you might've missed while you were looking up scenic Japanese suicide forests.”

“Knock it off!”

“Oooh wait where was that section you did on fertility gods?”

 _Noooo not the fertility gods._ Jazz makes a tiny, shrieking little noise of alarm and reaches so far across her torso is flat on the tabletop. She paws vainly at the journal, trying to grab hold of his arm and drag the book down closer but he just switches hands and holds it high above her head and she's reduced to punching his chest while he laughs. “Don't you dare Danny I told you to give it come on!”

“Geez no wonder Mom and Dad freaked out how can that dude even walk with that thing...”

“I'm going to _kill_ you, you little-”

Someone clears their throat. Loudly. Jazz and Danny freeze and turn their heads.

“You kids need anything else?” The waitress asks blandly. The rest of the diner is eerily quiet, as if all conversation stopped all at the same time.

Cheeks hot, Jazz slides herself off the table and back in her seat. Danny quickly hands her the journal back. “No, we're...uh...fine, thank you. Can we have the check?”

“Sure,” the waitress says tarty.

They watch her march off and the rest of the diner goes back to their meals. Danny shakes his head. “I can't take you anywhere nice, can I?”

She checks to make sure the waitress isn't looking before bashing his face with the journal.

 

* * *

 

 

Jazz parks along the curb across from a two-story house indistinguishable from it's neighbors. She rechecks the address on her phone's GPS app.

“Looks like this is the place.”

“Great,” Danny mutters, still pouting in the passenger seat. He'd reluctantly admitted that a 'badass black motorcycle' didn't mesh well with their cover ID, but that didn't stop him from fuming over leaving it back at the hotel like an actual four-year old.

They climb out of the Prius and make their way down an old brick path cutting through the front lawn. A sugar maple casts a swaying shadow over them as they climb up the steps.

Jazz's idea was to treat the string of suicides like an epidemic, so it makes sense to start their investigation with the first victim, Anthony Collins. Their 'Patient Zero'.

“Now this is going to be delicate,” Jazz coaches. “So it might be best to let me do the talking.”

“Sorry, which of us hasn't been on a real Hunt since Dubyah? I forgot, since it _forever_ ago.”

“And which of _us_ has been studying 'dealing with grieving people' as a profession?”

Danny gestures at the door. “You wanna take the lead? Be my guest.”

“Okay, I will,” Jazz says, and presses the doorbell firmly.

As they wait and listen to footsteps in the house, Danny mutters, “I still say there's no way she's gonna buy that you're still in High-”

The door opens and Danny draws the last syllable to let out a mangled “Hiiiiiii.”

A woman's face appears in the narrow space in the slightly open door, tired and blinking owlishly, crow's feet all the more prominent by the dark, bruising lack of sleep around her eyes. Antony’s mother, Diane Collins, reeks like she's sprinkled her clothes with an ashtray.

She rasps with a throat disused for all but swallowing smoke. “Yes?”

“Ms. Collins?” Jazz pipes up with a hesitant girl's voice. “Um...hi. I'm Jody. Jody Irwin. And this Nick,” Danny raises his hand. “Nick Dunn. We're seniors over at the school newspaper.”

“Oh,” she says. “Was there something I could do for you to?”

“We know it's a lot to ask, but...with everything happened lately, a lot of people are scared, and the school's been worse than useless. So a few of us at the paper thought maybe we could try and do something to help. We've been going around talking to the friends and family of a few of the people we've lost. The _Chronicle's_ just been making a big spectacle of how they...died, but we want to tell everyone who'll listen who they _were_...if that makes any sense?”

“Maybe it'll even help other people, y'know?” Danny put in, shy and nervous behind her. “Convince them that there are better options out there.”

Ms. Collins didn't reply at first, looking at Jazz as everything they threw at her sinks in. “Did you...know Anthony at all?”

“We were sort of in different circles. Newspaper and year book geek, you know? I saw him around a lot. Just...” Jazz averts her eyes and tucks a wayward lock of hair back behind her ear with convincing shyness. “Never worked up the courage to talk to him.”

It's the best kind of lie- one that lets someone jump to their own conclusions. Ms. Collins nods and smiles at Jazz with melancholy reassurance- as if they were comrades in all the missed opportunities and things that will forever stay unsaid. Just like that they have a connection, and Jazz sets a mental reminder to loathe herself for all of this later.

“Please, come in,” Ms. Collins steps aside and opens the door wider for them. Danny and Jazz manage to not flinch at the invitation.

She leads them to a living room that probably hasn't seen a proper cleaning in weeks. Photo albums, filthy coffee mugs, and overcrowded ashtrays crowd the coffee table. The couches smell like smoke and nicotine has settled into ever fiber. A few of the framed family pictures seem to be recent as this year; Ms. Collins looks she's aged ten years since they'd been taken.

“I'm so sorry about this mess,” she fusses over the mugs and bowls of cigarette butts. “Haven't had too many visitors lately.”

“Oh it's fine, really. Don't worry about it.” Jazz tells her. She sits down with Danny on the couch opposite.

Ms. Collins stained fingers grasp for the ghost of a cigarette. “So...where do you want to start?”

Jazz sets down her cellphone on the coffee table between them and hits record. “Why don't we just start off small. Just...tell us about Tony.”

Ms. Collins starts talking and slowly comes alive, like color coming back into her skin, hands moving to animate a story or to start pulling out pictures. Sometimes a smile and even a little laugh escapes her, even though the dim fatigue never leaves her eyes. Tony was always a handful, but never made things difficult for her, even after his dad walked out on the family when he was just eight. It was them against the world; he was always responsible - the closest thing to teenaged rebellion he ever managed was sub-par math grades and his wardrobe. He always got home for curfew, kept the house clean, did his own laundry, even made a nice dinner for the both of them, since school got out before her shift. “Boy was a better cook than me, without a doubt.”

Danny politely apologizes when he needs to use the washroom. When Ms. Collins brings out a photo album it gives Jazz a good excuse to move and sit down next to her.

Anthony was tall, olive skinned, thick dark hair unkempt. His pants were baggy and barely hung off his hips and his vintage _Fanning the Flames_ t-shirt was at least a size too big. Jazz recognizes more than just the artwork from an old eighties album. She recognizes the boy and girl Tony had hooked under each arm. Their expressions, captured in between laughter and beaming grins, feels much more real than the posed, professional portraits from their obituaries.

“I know those two,” Jazz points them out.

“Ryan Stewart and Gianna Garcia,” she nods, eyes glued to the picture. “Tony's best friends. The three of them were inseparable. If they weren't at school or upstairs watching movies and listening to their old records, you can bet they were spending every waking moment texting or talking on their computers. We- the Stewarts and her father Ricardo- we liked to joke that they even-” The chokes back a sudden and devastated sob and covers her mouth.

“Ms. Collins?”

“It's bad enough that Tony- but losing them too,” She clenches the album tightly. “They were over so often they felt like my own sometimes. I knew how bad it hit them. I even let them take what they wanted from Tony's room- some clothes, pictures, his music. They had as much of a right to those things as me, and now... ” She closes her mouth firmly, like she's swallowing a bitter pill. Her eyes are shimmering wet. “I should have _known!_ I should have seen the signs!”

Jazz puts her hand on her shoulder. “Diane, more often than not, when someone's contemplating suicide, there aren't _any_ warning signs. They don't let their loved ones know what they're planning because they don't want to be stopped, or they're afraid of how they'll be treated. You can't save them anyone if you don't even know they need help.”

Of course, when monsters and dark magic are involved, it's pretty easy to miss the warning signs too.

“I just...I just wish I knew _why_. A note, a message. _Something_.”

“Most people don't leave notes. Sometimes it's hard to say goodbye, or they just can't find a way to express what they're feeling into words. What he did-” Wasn't his fault. Was done to him by some evil creature lurking in the dark. “Had nothing to do with you. It was stupid, pointless act done on impulse with no regard for who it hurt. You have a right to upset- even angry- about what happened. The most important thing you can do is not turn those feelings inward.”

She almost chuckles. “That's exactly what my therapist keeps telling me. Maybe I should just lay down on the couch and tell you all my problems. Probably be cheaper.”

“I do happen to run a independent counseling office in the second floor girl's bathroom. Are you free during study hall?”

Ms. Collin's smiles warmly, the tension creasing her face slowly receding like spring sun on frost. It must have been weeks since she'd last had anything to smile about. “I...I really want to let you know how much I appreciate what you kids are doing, Jody,” she says, and it takes Jazz half a second to remember that was the name she'd given her. “Seeing you all step up and make a difference on your own- it really means a lot to me- and I'm sure the others will say the same thing. Probably even more. Anthony was the first, but by the they found poor Emily Russell found her boy hanging in his room, the press started calling it a 'teen suicide epidemic' and wouldn't give them a moment's piece when they're trying to bury their child.”

“But the reporters have been leaving you alone?”

“Anthony was 'old news' by the time the story really started picking up,” she says, scathing and bitter. “But it was only a matter of time before the bigger news outlets started getting interested. Can you imagine? Like they don't have enough things happening in the whole country, they have to come here and circle around my house like vultures?”

An alarm bell goes off in Jazz's head. She's plugged herself into every available source of information about the case, and can't think of a major, national news network running anything that had to do with the suicides. Too busy reporting the latest political nonsense or juicy sex scandal. “You mean reporters from a major news network actually came to your door asking about Anthony?”

“Not like a huge news van was parked on my lawn or anything. Just a woman and her cameraman dragging all this equipment, wanting to come into the house.”

Every instinct screams at Jazz to ask for every detail, but she holds herself back and casually asks, “They didn't happen to leave a business card with you, did they?”

 

* * *

 

 

Ms. Collins actually hugs her on her way out the door. And also wishes Danny better luck with his stomach problems, what with being locked in the bathroom for so long.

They smile, thank her, and say absolutely nothing to each other until they're safety back in the Prius.

The doors slam simultaneously and Jazz asks, “Find anything?”

“Kid croaked two months ago, Jazz. Not sure what you expected to find.” He says. “If there _had_ been EMF it would have dissipated weeks ago, and any witch worth their powder would have grabbed any hex bags first chance they got. Oh, and no sulfur either, in case we wanted another thing to tell us it's not demons.”

“What about his room?”

He hands her his phone. “Got a nice panorama of the whole thing, for what it's worth.”

Jazz holds the phone sideways and uses her finger to navigate what could only be described as an audiophile’s paradise. Racks holding towers of CDs, piled milkcrates full of vinyl albums, an electric guitar tucked into the corner, a turntable, CD player, expensive speakers plugged into his laptop, vintage album posters that crossed decades and genres.

“Whoa. Anthony was really into his music.”

“Yeah,” Danny nods. “Pretty impressive. Even all the old records didn't seem to be a hipster thing; guy even had a tape deck. For cassettes. Who even _uses_ tapes anymore?”

“Everybody's got to have a hobby,” Jazz zooms in on his music collection and frowns. Her instincts itch but she can't nail down what it was that was bothering her.

“So...what happened with you and the guy's mom?”

“Diane, Danny. And his name was Anthony.”

“Excuse me if I'm trying to work this case like professional, Doctor Phil.”

Jazz goes very still. “You _know_ how I feel about that quack,” she hisses.

“I'm just saying, if you were too busy playing grief counselor to actually get-”

She pulls out the business card and lays it down on the dashboard like a poker player with a winning hand.

Danny snatches it up and gapes at the lettering. “Ingrid Krueger? This is one of Mom's press covers!”

“Uh-huh.”

“So Mom and Dad were really there.”

“Looks like.”

“...you're going to smugly be not-smug about this, aren't you.”

“It's a possibility.”

“Okay, yeah, working the case gave us a lead on Mom and Dad. You were _right_. Happy?”

She looks back at the house. “No. Not really.”

The house somehow seems closer. This heavy presence looming over their shoulders. “Who's next on the list?” Danny asks.

“Anthony's friends. They died just a day apart, right after his funeral.”

“You know it's only going to get harder, the further down we go down that list, right?” Danny tell her. “Some of those parents still had kids and happy families just last month. It's still gonna be raw.”

She knows he's trying to be kind. “A month, a year; do you really think that'll make much of a difference, for them?”

“No, I guess not,” He admits. “I'm just saying it's not our job to hold their hands and be a sympathetic ear. It's our job to make sure that it never has to happen to anyone else's kid.”

“I thought our job was finding Mom and Dad?” Jazz asks wryly.

Danny glances back at the house, pensive like he somehow can still see Ms. Collins in the window. “No reason we can't do both.”

Jazz starts up the car to hides her smile, thinking back on the the little boy that ran around the house with a bedsheet tied around his neck while Danielle cackled and held innocent teddy bears for random.

Her baby brother, always the Hero.

 

* * *

 

The next victims were Tony's friends, Ryan Stewart and Ginny Garcia. Ms. Stewart says maybe three entire sentences for the entire half-hour they're there, her husband doing most of the talking with his arm perpetually wrapped around her shoulders as if she'll just crumble away if he wasn't there to hold her in place.

Ricardo Garcia is a twitchy, out-of-focus man barely keeping himself together for his surviving daughter. Jazz treaded very carefully to not upset the fragile Jenga tower holding the man's stability in place while Danny spent most of his time quietly sitting on the steps with Gianna's little sister, Rosa. Back into the car, Danny pulls out a folded piece of construction paper from his jacket. A crayon scribbled, dark silhouette wreathed in blue fire snarls at them. He makes a joke how Rosa art skills give Jazz a run for her money, but it feels forced and hollow.

The next house. Jazz has each and every name memorized. Has them filed on cozy mental shelf alongside a mnemonics for individual brain structures and their functions. Mike Russell, hung himself. Victoria Lewis, swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills and never woke up. Cerebral Cortex. Corpus Callosum. Hypothalamus.

On and on the parade of grieving parents, brothers, sisters. Families irreparably broken. Jazz is sitting on a loveseat in the Lewis' living room when she remembers her Dad carrying Danielle, small and weak and broken, in the shelter of his big arms while he talks softly to her, telling her how everything was going to be alright. Her Mom falling asleep next to her bed for days on end until she finally woke up. Years of anger and tight frustration loosens in her and she doesn't want to do this anymore. She just wants Danny and her to find their parents so she can hug them and tell them she missed them and probably yell at them a little, too.

They make passing inquiries on their way out. Off-handed comments on those out-of-town Big Network reporters with nothing better to do than harass people trying to grieve. Not like you kids, of course. I told them to get off my property. Who even wears that much orange?

Danny's the one running interference with Sofia Taylor's father. Jazz takes a panoramic photo of her bedroom, every available shelf bowing with the weight of her music collection. Swap all the music for books on psychology and ancient religions and it could be her a own room. What she doesn't find is sulfur, or an EMF signal that can't be explained by normal ambient electrical interference. There's no sign of a black shadow-monster made of blue fire in the bathroom. Just a bathtub with bleached brown stains almost up to the brim.

Cerebellum. Medulla Oblongata.

The man that answers at Justin Hill's house looks like his last shave was two weeks ago and his smells like his only showers were cheap bourbon. He hears out the seventh rendition of their cover story and politely slams the door in their faces. Jazz recalls that two weeks earlier Justin had found the key to his father's lockbox and used the Glock inside to obliterate the contents of his skull (olfactory bulbs, hippocampus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei).

“Well that could have gone better,” Danny declares.

“I'm honestly surprised we actually managed six out of seven,” she admits.

“Safe to say that was all you, Jazz. You know, I think all that psychology nonsense actually buffed your Persuasion skills, back there.”

“You've been playing too much D&D with Tucker,” she says, and hopes he doesn't notice her blush.

“Where else am I gonna be a wandering Paladin righting wrongs and slaying evil monsters?”

She covers her mouth to muffled the snort of laughter trying to escape. “Well it's gotta be easier a lot easier job than this- our only lead just dried up.”

“You've obviously never had Tuck as a dungeon Master,” Danny says gravely. “And I wouldn't say our _only_ lead,” his eyes twinkle. “ 'Cause I've been thinking...”

She can't resist. “Heeeere we go.”

He pauses his train of thought long enough to flip her the bird, “ _So I was thinking..._ this town's not all that big, right? Can't be any more than three or four motels in the whole county. If we go around and start canvassing, maybe we find out where they were staying and get back on track to finding out what happened to them.”

Jazz could slap herself on the forehead. “Their _hotel,_ of course! How did we miss something so obvious?”

“What's all this 'we'? I'm the one who just figured it out.”

“So how do we decide which one to check first? Rock, paper, scissors?”

“Or,” Danny pulls up a GPS map with his phone. “We can start with this one.”

 

* * *

 

Jazz stays behind with the car while Danny chats up the motel desk. Out the driver's side window, she can clearly see the Denny's across the street from the parking lot.

A hotel right next to a Denny's. They might as well have rearranged the letters of today's special to spell 'JACK FENTON WAS HERE AND WE WERE UNPREPARED' as a warning to others.

Danny walks out of the office and Jazz is doubly sure they're in the right place. She can spot his self-congratulatory smirk from across the lot. She's already out of the car when he strides up and announces, “Guy definitely recognized them from the picture. Room 23, paid in advance until the end of the month.”

“What line did you feed him?”

“Chett _might_ have been under the impression I was a P.I. chasing down a pair of adulterers.”

Well, that's certainly a lie a guy who works at a sleazy motel would be most likely to believe. “Okay, firstly: Ew. Second: you just so happen to have a fake New Jersey Private Investigator's License on you?”

“Nah, just a fifty.”

“Ah. So, does Chett happen to remember the last time he saw the lovebirds?”

Danny laughs. “Yeah, like our luck is going to be that good.”

Counting the Prius, there's only three cars in the entire motel parking lot- one of them presumably belonging to their buddy Chett. The long procession of rooms has an air of stale desertion hotels accumulate on the droughts between tourist seasons. Jazz and Danny stop together in front of the door for Room 23 and hesitate, as if Jack Fenton were going to throw open the door any second, scoop them into one of his enormous, crushing hugs and ask what kept them.

“Rock, paper, scissors to decide who has to knock?” Danny suggests.

“Just get it open.”

“Yeah, yeah, fine. Cover me,” Danny kneels and pulls out the little black case holding his lockpick set.

He delicately slides the torsion wrench and the hook-pick into the key hole without making a sound. Jazz pulls out her phone and pretends to text while leaning casually against the wall, blocking the office's view off Danny should Chett look their way.

“Good thing this is one of those crap old hotels that still use old-fashioned locks,” Danny comments while he works. “I hate spoofing those keycard readers. No challenge.”

“On the other hand, we'd be inside by now.”

The lock clicks. Danny turns the knob experimentally. “You were saying?”

Jazz checks her phone. “Eighty-six seconds. Not bad.”

“Next B&E we'll see how rusty you are.” Danny pockets the picks and pulls out his white-gripped M-5 as inconspicuously as possible. “Think you still got the moves, Ivy League?”

Jazz draws her Cherokee and clicks the safety off. She takes a ready position at his back. “Guess we'll see.”

Danny opens the door from an angle takes the first step in, Jazz keeping to his left. She nudges the door shut with her foot and they clear the room just like they'd drilled together hundreds of times. Move together, pistols systematically sweep across the entire room starting from the corners and meeting in the middle.

Jazz can count the number of times she's taken her guns out to the range on one hand since she'd left. Even four years later it's still so thoughtlessly mechanical.

The room is empty. She doesn't know why she would think differently. Danny checks the bathroom while Jazz crouches and checks under the queen bed.

“Clear,” he calls.

“Clear,” she flicks Cherokee's safety back on and holsters it.

Danny gives the bare room another once over and shrugs at Jazz with the universal expression of 'okay what now?' “Great. Another dead end.”

She sees the same bare walls, made bed, and comes to a different conclusion. “Not necessarily. No Mom and Dad doesn't mean we haven't found _something._ ”

“What are you talking about? Look around, there's nothing here.”

“Exactly. Monsters don't clean up after themselves. Mom and Dad slipped out without letting the motel know and left nothing traceable behind.”

She can see the exact moment the Danny catches up with her as the relief floods his face. “That means they're alive.”

“They're alive,” Jazz almost smiles.

“Okay, they're not dead. Awesome,” He throws up his arms at the parentless room. “So where the hell _are_ they, then? Did they finish the job and decided to take a 'gross old married-couple' vacation without telling us?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Or...maybe they knew we'd come looking for them and they deliberately left something behind for us to find.”

“Great. Classic Parental-Paranoia Scavenger Hunt. Now it's _really_ a Fenton Family Outing.” Danny rifles through the little plastic trash bin next to the bed and pulls out some crumpled Arby's wrappers. “Think Dad was trying to tell us something?”

“I don't think there's even an Arby's in this county, where did he get those?”

“He found a way.”

They start at the obvious places. Overturn the mattress, check the busted A/C unit, in vents. When nothing turns up, they start trying the weirder places: showerhead, the toilet tank, the sink pipes, even rattled the shampoo bottles for the sound of something that didn't belong.

After an almost forty minutes they start getting desperate. Danny goes through the empty dresser drawers again while Jazz eyeballs every square inch of wall trimming for slicks- little hollowed out spaces for small and innocuous enough that some folded paper could slide into.

She spots it on the wood doorframe. Not a slick. A sigil. Subtly carved into the wood just above the door with a fine, sharp blade. A simple box, four lines stretch up and a fifth angling toward the lidless eye in the center. Like a child's drawing of a flat hand, made to ward off evil from passing the threshold.

She feels the shape of it like the weight of coins set on her gaping eyeballs. Impressions nestled in the wrinkles of her thoughts full her nose with mold, ink, and fish rotting on a shore that human feet have never soiled.

_(Her mother puts the knife in her hand. She holds it like a dense, useless block of metal)_

_(Okay honey. Now you try it, just like I did. I know you can)_

_(She can't though. She can't. Just the_ concept _is a sharp, aphasic worm wriggling around in the soft tissue of her brain like barbed wire)_

_(It's alright, Jazzy-pants. You don't have push yourself)_

“Find anything?”

Jazz whips around, swaying in the disorientation of someone just jostled from a dream. “Huh? Uh...no, not really.”

He snorts. “Yeah, that's because you were standing around like a lump. Me, on the other hand...” he turns over the drawer, and whoops with victory at the flash drive taped underneath. “Jackpooooot. They must have figured we'd follow their trail and left us trail of breadcrumbs.”

She looks at the little thumb drive and does not look at the door. She feels its eye like a flea on her scalp and her hand keeps drifting to one of her knives, any knife, so long as it can dependably carve into drywall and cheap hotel balsa wood.

Danny misinterprets the distance in her eyes. “I'm sure they're okay, Jazz. This is a good sign, right? They bugged out clean, just like they taught us.”

“Yeah,” She nods, head numb from phantom acupuncture. “There's nothing else here. We should take that back to the hotel and see what's so important about it.”

The room looks like a privacy-invading tornado blew its way through the room. They don't bother to clean up.

 

* * *

 

The flash drive is encrypted, of course, just in case it hadn't been them that found it. It takes two tries to crack the “password.”

Honestly Dad, 'santaisreal'? _Really?_

Their parents are probably the only Hunters who approach their cases like scientists, instead of something between homicide detectives and big game hunters. Maddie Fenton's notes are immaculate, detailed, and thoroughly notated (of course they are all Mom's notes- Dad hasn't had recorder privileges since the Wiccan festival incident). There's more than just Danny's news clippings or Jazz's shorthand interview notes- the drive is full of coroners reports, on-scene photos, police records- they even managed to break into the County Coroner while they still had Anthony Collins on a slab.

(Every photograph Jazz has ever seen of him is bright, active, smiling, alive. She scrolls through images of him pale, stiff, eyes closed, a perfect line of purple and blue around his throat like a necklace and does not think of his mother sitting alone couch, a wire-frame woman one stray pressure-point from breaking.)

Jazz pays particular attention to that part of her mother's notes- all the other victims were cold and buried, and a coroners were rarely on the lookout for signs of sulfur, unusual electro magnetic interference, or witchcraft.

Still, you'd think the anyone with working eyes would have noticed the dark green ooze dribbling from Anthony's ears.

“I'll be damned.”

Danny leans over her shoulder. “What's up? Find something?”

“Mom and Dad. They found trace amounts of ectoplasm in Anthony Collins' ears.”

“Ectoplasm? For real?” he whistled. “Damn. I've only seen that stuff in-person once, and that was a seriously pissed off ghost. Like, full blown closet-monster from _Poltergeist_ pissed. But the ghost-snot was running down the walls, not coming out of orifices. You ever heard of anything like that?”

“Maybe? I've heard of vengeful spirits and specters powerful enough to possess people, but if a ghost was forcing all of the victims to commit suicide, then they should be dying in exact same way, like the ghost reenacting its own death.”

“Hey, at least we've finally got a solid lead- ectoplasm! Not demons, or witches or Krautcutter things- just a good old fashioned chain-rattling _ghost_ and wow I am way too chipper about this.”

“Well maybe this will spoil your mood a little,” Jazz angles the screen. “I've been putting together a list of every suicide and violent death in the area as far as the newspapers go, and unless we find something to narrow it all down we're talking _hundreds_ of possibles. And that's even assuming whoever it is even lived and died in the area.”

“Here, move over,” Danny nudges her aside and starts typing. “We need another pair of eyes on this. I'm kicking everything we have over to Tuck, maybe he can pick up on something we can't.”

“Tucker? Since when has he been mixed up in hunting?”

“A few years now. He sort of runs his own Hunter Help Line from his place in Champaign. Does research, chases down lore, that kind of stuff.”

“Tucker Foley,” Jazz repeats in askance. “The guy who barely leaves leaves the house. _That_ Tucker?”

“Who says he has to leave the house? He does it all with computers. Runs these algorithms that scour news sites for omens, disappearances, brutal deaths -all the red flags- then matches them with monster M.Os. He's found me a few cases with decades-old patterns that no Hunter would have spotted in a million years.”

She tries to reconcile the memory of sitting outside a locked bedroom door trying to coax Tucker into coming out to eat with some new tech-age Bobby Singer whose vice was anime and video games instead of hard liquor.

Danny sees her skepticism. “Seriously, Jazz. Tucker's come a long way since the last time you saw him. Helped a lot of Hunters save a lot of people. Even got himself roommate's who's pretty handy with tools, you can go there to fix up your ride or get some weapons made custom-order...”

“Danny, it's okay,” she cuts him off before he runs out of breath. “I believe you. It's great to hear how well he's doing; he was my friend too, remember?”

“Yeah, sorry. Guess I'm still a little protective over him. Overprotective. Right,” He goes back to work on Jazz's laptop. “I'll finish uploading this stuff to him, then. He keeps weird hours, so we should hear back from him pretty quick once he's done working his magic. Y'know...technology magic. With computers. Not magic-magic.”

“I got that, thanks.”

The hotel room is quiet while Danny taks away on the laptop. Jazz rustles through a paper bag caked with dried greese and munches on a few cold fries that somehow survived dinner.

Danny's face doesn't leave the screen. “So...it's Sunday.”

The clock on the taskbar reads just over one-am. Just barely. “So?”

“Sooo...have you thought about what happens if we don't have this hunt settled by tonight?”

Dammit, she knew this conversation was going to happen the second they found the empty hotel room. “Listen, Danny. I promised to help you find Mom and Dad, and all we found was that they skipped town without giving us any indication of where they were going.”

“And...what? So your job's done? Just like that? You're gonna to leave in the middle of a hunt?”

“Why not? They did. I'm not even a hunter anymore, Danny.”

“Not a hunter, huh? Then what do you call everything we've been doing all weekend?”

“Catching up with my baby brother.”

“Cute.” He says, cold. “And what about all the kids this spook's killed Jazz? All those couches you sat on talking to all the families that thing _tore apart_? You've got an obligation to-”

“I have my own obligations, Danny. I've got obligations with Kitty and our apartment, I've got obligations to my professors, my scholarship.”

He's turns on her, furious. “Are you seriously telling me that sitting in a class and writing term-papers is more important than this? I'm talking about _saving_ people!”

“ _So am I!”_ They're both out of their chairs, staring each other down like they're going to start throwing punches on one wrong word. “It's too late to save Anthony, but what about his mom? What if I want to help Diane with the death of her only son so she doesn't smoke herself to death? What about the little sister Ginny Garcia let behind?” He hestiates, and she doesn't stop. Can't stop. “What about Tucker, or Valerie, or Danielle? While you're running around saving people and hunting things, who's saving _them_?”

He doesn't have an answer for her. Jazz pants hard, as if letting all of that out physically drained her. She massages the bridge of her nose. “Listen, we're both had a long day. How about we just...turn in for the night, and see what Tucker has for us in the morning, okay?”

Danny sits down heavily and nods, eyes fixed on the corner of room. “Yeah. Okay. Sure.”

Quietly gathering up a towel and a change of clothes, Jazz locks the bathroom door, undresses, and sits down in the shower hugging her knees. Even in a crap hotel, it takes a while for the water to go from scalding hot to a spray of icy needles.

 

* * *

 

She dreams that it's her birthday.

Her parents lay the old tome down in front of her. Such an obvious gift, Jazz's room is a fortress of grimoires, bestiaries, psychology texts, history books, even a few trashy supernatural teen-dramas, absurd and inaccurate enough to be ironic escapism.

She opens the book, but does not read it. Cannot read it. The pages are not written in something so crude as language. They are syllables of Thought too curved and sinuous to rest on a human tongue. Cannot be voiced. She sees the symbols and simply has new thoughts and _understands._

But it's wrong, she doesn't want it, but she can't _not_ read it, can't shut off her brain to cut it off at the source. Hopeless as telling someone to not think of elephants.

She wants to push the book away, shut the cover and make the pages go disappear but it's too late, it's already in her, the text swimming in the pools of her eyes and seeping into her head like a swarm. An infection. They're wiggle into her brain and make her think ideas that aren't hers and she knows things people should never understand and she claws at her hair and screams.

Every beat of her heart is the thump of a drum, pumping and circulating it in her veins and lets it soak in. She is numb and tingles like her whole body is asleep and she sobs and stares at her hands and can feel the Thoughts whisper under her skin like a skittering hive devouring the very concept of Her and embedding Itself down into her heart and her breath and her bones and her soul

out out she wants it fucking _Out_

She takes a knife and cuts her wrists along the forearm and opens up the vein like Sofia Taylor taking a nap in a bathtub of cherry syrup but there's no blood no red it's just Impossible Sigils spilling out of her and making a puddle at her feet like a reflective pool with a book shimmering on a surface and Jazz sees her reflection in the Scriptures of Nameless Things and starts reading it all over again until Danny stomps down and splashes the Word

It's her brother but her eyes See and she thinks new Thoughts and she understands and the thing that's her brother but Not-Danny looms over her with a face bluer than a cold corpse and eyes Bathtub Suicide Red

Danny (Not-Danny) says her name like it encompasses everything she Was/Is/Will Ever Be and she hugs herself tight and sobs with the (hateloveenvydespairjoyragelust) overwhelming totality that is Herself and

“Jazz!”

Danny shakes her awake, and he's holding her wrist, itchy and intact, to keep the K-BAR in her hand from stabbing him in the shoulder.

“You with me Jazz?” His eyes are blue and examining her. Jazz has a haunting sense of _d_ _ _éjà vu__ looking at his face and does not understand why.

“Yeah. Sorry.” She lowers the knife slowly and shakes her head hard to knock her brain loose. Someone in the room, Danny's portable police scanner buzz out Dispatch voices between the static.

“What is it? What's wrong?”

“Get dressed,” he tells her. “There's been another one.”

“How bad is it?”

Jazz counts three full heartbeats before he answers. “...bad.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter seriously tried to kill me. 
> 
> But here we are! With dialogue and story and detective stuff! I was torn for a while about adding segments from the perspective of the victims, but that would have made it too obvious who the monster was and I- think- would have ruined the flow. 
> 
> Next chapter will be more in the way of action and closing the particular hunt, and then we move on to Danielle, which I am personally looking forward to. Girl has a...different way of doing things than Jazz. 
> 
> Again, sorry you had to wait so long. After chiseling at this for so long, it's really gratifying to finally have it posted. I went over it a dozen-dozen times writing and rewriting it so hopefully the spelling and grammatical mistakes are few and will be corrected. 
> 
> Until next time, thanks for reading and please feel free to share your comments. I am a creature that subsists entirely on praise and Dani phanart.
> 
> PS: a special thanks to my best friend [Guardiankarenterrier](http://archiveofourown.org/users/GuardianKarenTerrier/pseuds/GuardianKarenTerrier) for suggesting Dani and Danny's t-shirts. I'm sure her twin brother and her were nothing but a blessing on their unprepared parents.


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